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Prototype Tool Review: JustInMind

Tuesday September 27, 2011

Last month Jen Matos did an overview of a few of the most well known prototyping tools. Over the next few weeks we’ll be taking a deeper, more in depth look at all of these tools.  The first prototype tool I decided to take a closer look at was JustInMind. JustInMind is easily accessible, offers a 30 day free trial and free online tutorials.

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Pros/Cons

Pros: Nice interface, good online video tutorials, ability to publish online for easy usability testing (also in HTML format). Cons: Sharp learning curve, hard to customize tables, views, fonts, somewhat counter intuitive.

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Advantages

Quick simple prototypes and wire-frames.  Ability to add images, links, interactive fields.  Easy translation for usability testing.

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Pricing

Low end, with discounts for students and non-profit organizations.

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Reviewing

To review this software I set about creating two prototypes: one low-fidelity (reddit.com) and one high-fidelity (kennethcole.com).  My goal was to find the quickest, easiest way to prototype both of these sites using my background in digital prototyping and the features I learned from the online tutorials.

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Creating a Low-Fidelity Prototype : reddit.com

My impression of the software is that it would be great for quick low-fidelity designs and wire-frames.  I ran into some trouble when attempting to use repeated rows in data tables and ended up having to dial back and instead use screenshots of the original site and place them in a table with tags to link out.  The interface was simple enough to create a basic page with but creating pixel perfect prototypes doesn’t seem to be a strong point of JustInMind.  Switching views or using expandable layers seems to cause problems when placed in tables.  Linking from page to page proved to be simple and actions were easy to use after a few times of creating them.  Because of the different avenues (and some dark alleys) I wandered down, it took me quite a while (a few days) to get my prototype (well, 4 of them) to have the interaction and more or less look and feel of reddit.com

This is the JustInMind interface with my first attempt at creating reddit.com with a dynamic data table and repeated rows:

After I rebuilt my prototype with screenshots and link targets this is the finished product.  As I mentioned I ran into trouble with spacing for the alternating layers in the table:

Creating a High-Fidelity Prototype : kennethcole.com

I wanted to prototype a site that had a lot of graphics, some flash and an interactive design; kennethcole.com fit the bill (plus there was the added bonus of being able to drool over the shoes while I put it all together).  I ran into some of the same problems creating this high-fidelity prototype as I did with the low-fidelity prototype, namely spacing issues, changing layers (switching views) and creating pixel perfect alignment.  I went down a lot of paths that seems like a good idea at first, but ended up taking way too much time, and in the end, not creating as tight a look as I was shooting for.  As this was the second prototype I attempted with JustInMind the ramp up time was quicker, but still took me a couple of days to understand basic interaction and many hours messing with images and trying to line things up just right.

This is the JustInMind interface with the beginnings of the kennethcole site:

After initially attempting to break it up into tables, I realized that in order to achieve a pixel perfect prototype, I would need to preserve the original images and go about creating multiple layers.  This worked as long as the layers were the same size:

Wrap-Up

JustInMind is a great tool and I’d recommend it to prototypers working heavily in wire-frames, low-fidelity and without a need for heavy data interaction.  The tutorials proved to be helpful, but moving from beginner to advanced user in a week proved difficult.  Additionally, creating both low and high fidelity prototypes with the software might be a bit much for the average prototyper. Score: 3.5 (out of 5)